The Pluto August update

Another month, another step closer to launching Pluto! Here’s the latest from Planet Pluto in August.

New brand

As we mentioned when we changed our name to Pluto, we would be undergoing a full-on re-brand. This is pretty much complete and our Head of Product and Design, Harry, will soon be writing up a full summary to show off everything the new brand has to offer. So I won’t spoil that surprise, a little teaser for now though…

As all good businesses do, we’ve also trademarked our new name and logo to make sure we protect our beautiful new brand.

One step closer

We’re making good progress with the FCA, and have had some detailed reviews of our full prototype. It’s always great to get feedback from the regulators before committing time and money to building something out. We’re definitely one step closer to restricted authorisation.

The key learning for me this month has been the FCA’s ‘Treating Customer Fairly’ principles (usually referred to as TCF), these are all relatively obvious for any company that puts the customer at the heart of the design and development process, but it’s a good reminder to ensure we should provide access to key services through a number of channels.

Building our product

Development is now well and truly underway. With a number of developers building our core architecture and product foundations. In simple terms, we have a few key applications to build; the chatbot app (that connects to Facebook Messenger), a customer web app and an admin web app. For the techies reading, our front ends are built using Facebook’s React to be fast and light. Our backend is using Node, to be efficient and scalable with Express for the APIs. A relatively typical modern web architecture.

We’ll write a post later down the line with more details on our technical design. The key objective right now for the team is to get something live ASAP. We’ll also share some screenshots next month to give you a sneak peek.

Remember, you can sign up for early access at https://pluto.insure/ (early sign ups get a discount on their first policy)